In October of last year we worked with Hackster.io to launch the Amazon Alexa API Mashup Contest challenging developers to connect their favorite public APIs to Alexa. Developers submitted 163 projects that connected Alexa to the APIs of companies like Slack, Medium, Yelp, and many others.

Special thanks to everyone who competed in this contest. We were impressed by the creativity, quality, and high number of entries. We encourage you to browse through the projects. Each one comes with source code and documentation that might be a helpful reference when you code your next Alexa skill.

Today we announced Merch by Amazon, a new self-service program designed to help you increase revenue through the sale of branded t-shirts designed by you and produced, sold and shipped by Amazon. With the print on demand service, you sell only the t-shirts your customers want to buy.  You never have to worry about inventory or out-of-pocket costs.  For every t-shirt sold, you earn a royalty.  The more t-shirts sold, the higher the royalty is.

To get started, simply set-up your Merch by Amazon account, upload the artwork for your t-shirt, and push submit - Amazon takes care of the rest.  In a matter of hours, your custom t-shirt is available for sale worldwide on Amazon.com.  Once you’ve created your custom t-shirts, you can also promote them in-game on the Android, Fire OS, or iOS versions of your game via Amazon Mobile Ads.

If you use the Amazon Mobile Ads API and build your app with Apple’s iOS 9 SDK (or Xcode7), the new iOS 9 App Transport Security (ATS) feature will affect your app’s ability to receive ads from the Amazon Mobile Ad Network.

The new App Transport Security feature prevents ads being served via non-secure HTTP, and by default it only allows HTTPS connections over TLSv1.2. There are other security requirements that you should be aware of such as new ciphers and certificates requirements – please see iOS 9 documentation.